Editorials

Years ago, a reporter spoke with a woman whose house was along the path of the proposed U.S. 70 bypass of Clayton. She did not want to sell her house, did not want to move, and she said something like this: “If not for all these newcomers, we wouldn’t need this road.”

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At schools like Cooper Elementary in Clayton and West Smithfield Elementary, more than half of students cannot read or do math on grade level, based on scores from year-end tests. Is it any wonder then that Cooper and West Smithfield, among other Johnston schools, earned D’s when the N.C. ...

My daughter and I text every day, and in recent weeks, she has texted two questions worth sharing: Why are some people rude? And why is it so hard to talk to a cute boy? I’ll tell you what I told her, though I must confess I know nothing about talking to cute boys.

The Town of Clayton will either buy and rehab a downtown building entirely at taxpayer expense or share that costly burden with a private developer. Either way, when Clayton no longer has need for the building, which might become a library annex, the town will sell it to a private party.

We don’t envy Johnston school board members or Superintendent Ed Croom. Soon they will have to explain to anxious, perhaps angry parents why their child’s school received an F grade from the state while another school in Johnston received an A.

The Johnston County Area Transit System, or JCATS for short, is not a public transit system in the familiar sense of the term. It has no fixed routes on which people wait at bus stops for a ride to work, the grocery store or doctor’s office.

On Dec. 1, Johnston County Commissioners will decide whether to rezone a youth baseball field built with county bond dollars. It would seem a foregone conclusion, because to deny the zoning change – and shutter the ball field – would waste those county dollars, some $147,000 in all.

In Smithfield, two nonprofit groups have broken ground on town-owned land for a ball field and playground for special-needs children. In Clayton, a citizens’ committee has unveiled the design of an inclusion park there.

On Tuesday, Jim Davenport, a retired police officer who lives near Kenly, lost his write-in campaign for sheriff, 38,821-1,097. If an email to this newspaper and others is any indication, he blames the media for his pummeling at the polls.